Scan
times seem reasonable. Small scans at low resolution can happen in less
than a minute, and if you start turning on all the features for which
you paid good money you can slow things down so far that it can take an
entire day for one scan.

Big
scans with ICE and multiple sampling can take a while: a 35mm slide really
scans at 4,800 DPI in a minute with no ICE. I can scan a 6x7 chrome at
3200 DPI in 2 minutes with no ICE, but if I use ICE that goes out to 10
minutes. Do that and add 16x sampling and it takes an hour. If you do
this in the stand-alone driver instead of Photoshop and it can take 3
hours. See what I mean?

Use
ICE, high resolution and multiple sampling only if you need them.

GEM
seems to take forever even to preview. GEM is for reducing grain from
fast negative film.

I tried
ROC once, but it took so long that the slide faded even more just waiting
for the prescan!

Here
are measured scan times on my Mac dual 450 MHz G4, OS 9.2.2, firewire
connection from within Photoshop 6.0.1, 1 GB RAM allocated to Photoshop,
20 gigs free HDD space. Yes, a lot of the scan times vary even with the
same settings. No, I don't know why; I'm just reporting what I timed.
I saw little variation between 16 and 8 bit scans.

As you
can see there are a lot of blanks. I just haven't tried those combinations
yet.

It takes
about three minutes of whirring and clunking when the scanner is first
turned on for it to warm up.

After
this first warmup the scanner is always ready to go without waiting, which
is better than all the other scanners I've used, save for the Nikons whose
LEDs require no warm up time. Other scanners like the Epsons, Microteks
and Canons always seem to be making me wait around for them to warm up
for each scan, even if it's been just a short time since the last scan.
If I was smarter one probably could program those other scanners to leave
the light on longer. It takes 1 minute to warm the bulb up again if the
scanner has been unused for more than two hours.

It takes
8 seconds to wake up the import driver after hitting File > Import
> Multi PRO in Photoshop.

It takes
33 seconds to create four index views from the 35mm slide holder. The
index views are to used reference which image you are addressing in the
subsequent prescans and scans.

I tried
one scan with the AF on Scan set to off and it was awful. I always leave
the box AF ON SCAN checked, although it takes an extra moment to get the
focus set each scan.

The
reported scan times are in addition to all this warmup and prescanning.
You can just jam in transparencies and forget the warm up and prescans
after the first scan. This is fine for 35mm, but with 120 you may not
be aligned well, so expect a 30 second prescan to allow you to tell the
scanner where to scan..

Scan
times will vary. When ICE is used the scans can take even longer than
I measured below if the original is in extra bad shape due to the even
more processing required during the scan. These times are for Velvia,
no ROC, no GEM, no USM, no curves.

Scan
times are from when I click SCAN to when the image pops up in Photoshop.

Times
for scanning negatives seem a little longer. 16 or 8 bit scans seem to
take the same amount of time.